Recently, the Museum has sponsored an exhibit
in the Virtual Museum/ Community Memories program. The exhibit, entitledThe
Musical and Agricultural Heritage of Eric Campbell, includes videos sound
recordings and photographs from the Steam-Powered Threshing Bees, Fiddler's
Jamborees, and more...

AND

The Society is currently sponsoring a follow-up
CHIN project, updating the Shawville/Clarendon/Thorne Historical Record Project
of 1973. That Opportunities For Youth project involved tape recording interviews
with elderly folks. The cassette recordings are being digitized, and photographs
made and/or found at that time are being processed, to create another Community
Memories Exhibit. Watch for it online hopefully in May 2011.

Digitized versions of the recordings are now on
file at the Pontiac Archives in Shawville.

The Shawville station of the PPJ
Railroad, as it appeared in its heyday, as the mainstay of
transportation up and down the Valley.

In the early 70's, an Opportunities For Youth project
was wrapping up its survey of personal Pontiac histories. It became known that
the former PPJ Railway station in Shawville was being sold and dismantled.

Shawville train station as it appeared in 1972,
shortly before being moved.The tracks have since been removed, and the
railbed is now the PPJ
Cyclopark.

A
committee was formed and local funds raised to buy the building, move it to its
present location at the southwest corner of the Shawville Fair grounds, and
establish a museum to display relics of early Pontiac County life.

The Train Station, moved to its new
location, renovated, remodeled and transformed into the Pontiac Museum

The museum was opened by the Rt. Hon. John Diefenbaker on Oct. 9, 1976.

The museum is open for visitors during special events such as Canada Day, the Shawville Fair,
weekends in the summer, and regularly hosts field trips for school groups. The museum includes a turn of
the century school room, a general store, agricultural tools, household
appliances, clothing and other heritage items.

Some of the many farm tools on display

The Parlour, featuring a Victrola, china
cabinet and stereopticon

Part of the one-room school
display

The General Store, with a wide variety of
goods which such a store would have stocked for the needs of rural
households

During this year's Shawville Fair,
around 350 people visited the museum, viewing these and other sights, swapping tales of
when they used such tools, attended such a school, shopped at such a store.

Several years ago, we noticed that the shingle roof, renewed
at the time the museum was relocated, was badly worn out and needed to be re-covered
before rain leaks in and damages the building or artifacts. Members of the
Historical Society, the Agricultural Society (which owns the building, as part
of the Fairgrounds) agreed that the roof should be recovered. It was further
decided that the dormers which previously had graced the roofline should
be rebuilt. It added to the construction costs, but adds to the beauty
of the building, and will open the upstairs to future usage.

Michael Neelin has drawn
this elevation to show how the building will look with the dormers restored,
but the gable ends in the present truncated hip roof style; to restore the old
full gables would require extensive dismantling and rebuilding, and so would be
prohibitively expensive.

And this artistic rendering of how the
museum will soon appear, with the shingles replaced, and the two dormers
rebuilt.